Letter: Undervoted to avoid electing unknown candidates

Patricia D. Gray

Friday

Aug 24, 2012 at 12:55 AM

Editor: Your editorial on Sunday titled "Our View" suggested that people who "undervote" are careless about the great privilege of voting. Maybe they just suffer from poor memories. And there were a lot of candidates for all the various positions.

I am 80 years along the road of life, and have never missed voting in any election when eligible. But during our latest election in St. Johns County, my husband and I deliberately did not vote for several of the positions, i.e., Mosquito Control and Port and Waterway authority. We had followed all available information on all open positions to be voted on, saved pro and con printed ads received by mail as well as paper clippings. On election eve, we sat down to go over all the saved information with our sample ballot. Lo and behold, when it came to the mosquito and port candidates we couldn't find anything we thought we had saved.The real problem was we could only remember that there were several candidates who, in our opinion, were totally unsuited for the jobs. Other would-be voters may possibly have the same problem as we do, that is, fuzzy memories. Meanwhile, since we couldn't remember the names, we decided it would be better not to risk putting in office someone we considered unsuitable, because we do believe that any vote could decide an election, sometimes to our detriment.

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